My place to think about education and connect with like-minded folks.

This week I gave a presentation to grade 3-5 teachers from around my district. One of the points I wanted to drive home to them is that number sense does not apply to only whole numbers. Students can (and should!) have number sense with regards to fractions and decimals as well.

One area where I see teachers frequently take shortcuts and/or avoid number sense is with comparing fractions. Some teachers teach their students to use cross multiplication to verify whether two fractions are equal. Others teach their students to use one and only one strategy for comparing fractions: find common denominators. This strategy works, don’t get me wrong. However, it develops one skill, not number sense.

When comparing fractions, students should be mentally choosing from a variety of strategies. Why? Because students might notice they can make a comparison quickly and mentally. Why go to the trouble of creating common denominators, which likely involves making some notes on paper, if you can mentally make a comparison based on your understanding of fractions?

To that end, I put together three “books” that teachers could use to prompt some discussion and reasoning among their students. I’d love for their students to start realizing that fractions are something they can make sense of.

Eating Half (1/29/2015 Fixed page 4 so final fraction is 3/6, not 2/4.)

Each book focuses on comparisons around a particular strategy, but the strategy is never spelled out for the students. Instead, my hope is that by noticing, wondering, questioning, reasoning, and communicating, a class of students can make sense of the strategy in each book.

By no means are these books intended to fully develop students’ number sense with regards to comparing fractions. Additional experiences and practice are likely required. However, if you’re a teacher who wants a place to start this work with your students, give these a try and let me know how it goes.

I’m a little bit embarrassed to share this story, but damn it, I’m so proud of myself I’m going to do it anyway. Apparently an extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning is all I needed to figure out the answer to a math problem that left me feeling dumb back when I was in middle or high school.

For the last hour or so that I was in bed, I dozed. At one point as I was going in and out of random dreams, an image flashed across my mind. It was a clever solution to a math problem I saw posted on Twitter a week or two ago. I can’t even remember what the problem was, just that the visual solution had this shape:

There were numbers in the squares, maybe counting how many squares are in each column? All I remember is that this visual represents how the answer to the problem is 42.

Clearly my memory of this problem is not what I’m proud of. The important thing is that this random image triggered the line of thinking I continued on.

So after thinking about this image for a few seconds, I started to think about a math problem that has plagued me since I was in school: How can you quickly find the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 100?

I have no clue why this question popped in my mind, but it did, and since I was only semi-conscious, I just went where my thoughts took me.

I decided to try a simpler version of the problem to see if any insights struck me. I also tried thinking of a visual to see if it would lead me to a clever solution like the 42 image I was just thinking about.

I started with finding the sum of all the numbers from 1 to 5, and I thought of it like stair steps:

Then I played around with the squares in my mind to see if reconfiguring them would lead to an epiphany. My first thought was to redistribute the 5 squares to make columns of 4 which led me to this:

Having three 4s and a 3 made finding the sum a lot faster, but it didn’t seem generalizable. I decided to try summing all the numbers from 1 to 6 to see how my redistributing strategy would work.

Now I ended up with four 5s and a 1, which is easy to compute, but clearly showed me I wasn’t going to get anywhere satisfying with this strategy.

Feeling a bit frustrated, I started thinking about what it would look like if I made stair steps of all the numbers from 1 to 100. That’s when it hit me. The shape of the numbers from 1 to 100 is a jaggedy right triangle that looks kind of like this:

I thought to myself, if I duplicate that triangle, I can rotate it and fit it with the original triangle to make a rectangle. So long as I can find the number of squares in the rectangle, then all I have to do is half it to find the number of squares in the original triangle. All that was left was determining the dimensions of my rectangle.

I knew the length had to be 100 because I was finding the sum of the numbers from 1 to 100, so it is 100 units long. From there I had to think about the width of the rectangle if the tallest portion (100) was set on top of the shortest portion (1), which got me 101. I tested out the next few columns that would line up to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake. The 99 column would rest on top of the 2 column to get 101, and the 98 column would rest on top of the 3 column to also make 101.

I felt pretty confident that the height of my rectangle would be 101. Then it was just a matter of multiplying 101 by 100 and halving the product to find the number of squares in the numbers 1 to 100.

I had no idea if 5,050 is the correct answer, so I decided to go back to testing out smaller numbers to see if this idea was solid. I thought to myself that the dimensions of my rectangle for anything I try have to be n and n + 1, where n is the final number in my series.

So going back to the sum of the numbers from 1 to 5, I would be creating a rectangle that is 5 by 6, and then halving it to get 15. Then I tested out summing the numbers from 1 to 6. This makes a rectangle that is 6 by 7, which gives me 21 when it is halved.

Success!…followed by grabbing my phone and consulting the internet to make sure I was actually correct. When I saw that I had derived the same equation that I had been shown when I was a student years and years ago, I was beyond elated.

To give you a bit of back story, back when I was in school, I remember our teacher presenting us this exact problem, and I didn’t have a clue how to approach it. You may as well have asked me to sum all the numbers from 1 to 1,000,000. I hated challenges like this because I always ended up feeling stupid. Even after giving up and waiting for the teacher to share the solution with us, I still didn’t really get it.

The whole experience reinforced my fixed mindset thinking that I wasn’t actually intelligent at math. I may have been a whiz at learning procedures and following them, but when it came to doing “real” math, I was terrible at it. I think hearing the story about how Gauss solved this problem really quickly in elementary school didn’t make me feel any better about it either. Instead of being inspired about the power of looking for patterns, it only made me feel that much worse about myself.

It’s funny how many people see me today and hear what job I do and they automatically think of me as a “math person.” It’s true, today I am a “math person,” but only because I’ve put a ton of effort into relearning how to think about and do math for most of my adult life.

And finally, after all that hard work, here I am lying in bed at the age of 37, casually entertaining mathematical thoughts as I wake up, and I finally figured out that damn problem all by myself!

“They just add all the numbers. It doesn’t matter what the problem says.”

This is what a third grade teacher told my co-worker while she was visiting her classroom as an instructional coach. She didn’t really believe that the kids would do that, so she had the class come sit on the carpet and gave them a word problem. Sure enough, kids immediately pulled numbers out of the problem and started adding.

She thought to herself, “Oh no. I have to do something to get these kids to think about the situation.”

She brainstormed for a few moments, opened up Powerpoint, and typed the following:

Some girls entered a school art competition. Fewer boys than girls entered the competition.

She projected her screen and asked, “What math do you see in this problem?”

Pregnant pause.

“There isn’t any math. There aren’t any numbers.”

She smiles. “Sure there’s math here. Read it again and think about it.”

Finally a kid exclaims, “Oh! There are some girls. That means it’s an amount!”

“And there were some boys, too. Fewer boys than girls,” another child adds.

“What do you think fewer boys than girls means?” she asks.

“There were less boys than girls,” one of the students responds.

“Ok, so what do we know already?”

“There were some girls and boys, and the number of boys is less than the number of girls.”

“Look at that,” she points out, “All that math reasoning and there aren’t even any numbers in the problem. How many boys and girls could have entered into the competition?”

At this point the students start tossing out estimates, but the best part is that their estimates are based on the mathematical relationship in the problem. If a student suggested 50 girls, then the class knew the number of boys had to be an amount less than 50. If a student suggested 25 girls, then the number of boys drops to an amount less than 25.

When it seems like the students are ready, she makes a new slide that says:

Acting very curious, she asks, “Hmm, does this change what we know at all?”

A student points out, “We know how many girls there are now. 135 girls were in the competition.”

“So what does that tell us?”

Another student responds, “Now that we know how many girls there are, we know that the number of boys is less than 135.”

This is where the class starts a lively debate about how many boys there could be. At first the class thinks it could be any number from 0 up to 134. But then some students start saying that it can’t be 0 because that would mean no boys entered the competition. Since it says fewer boys than girls, they take that to mean that at least 1 boy entered the competition. This is when another student points out that actually the number needs to be at least 2 because it says boys and that is a plural noun.

Stop for a moment. Look at all this great conversation and math reasoning from a class that moments before was mindlessly adding all the numbers they could find in a word problem?

Once the class finishes their debate about the possible range for the number of boys, my co-worker shows them a slide that says:

“What new information do you see? How does it change your understanding of the situation?”

“Now we know something about the boys,” one of the students replies.

“Yeah, we know there are 15 boys,” says another.

“No, there are 15 fewer, not 15.”

Another debate begins. Some students see 15 and immediately go blind regarding the word fewer. It takes some back and forth for the students to convince each other that 15 fewer means that the number of boys is not actually 15 but a number that is 15 less than the number of girls, 135.

To throw a final wrench in to the discussion, she asks, “So what question could I ask you about this situation?”

To give you a heads up, after presenting to this one class she ended up repeating this experience in numerous classrooms across our district. After sharing it with hundreds of students, only one student out of all of them ever guessed the question she actually asked.

Do you think you know what it is? Can you guess what the students thought it would be?

I’ll give you a moment, just in case.

So all but one student across the district guessed, “How many boys entered the art competition?”

That of course is the obvious question, so instead she asked, “How many children entered the art competition?”

Young minds, completely blown.

At first there were cries of her being unfair, but then they quickly got back on track figuring out the answer using their thorough understanding of the situation.

And that is how my co-worker got our district to start using what she dubbed Numberless Word Problems – a scaffolded approach to presenting word problems that gets kids thinking before they ever have numbers or a question to act on.

Recently we shared this strategy with our district interventionists and several of them went off and tried it that week. They wrote back sharing stories of how excited and engaged their students were in solving problems that would have seemed too difficult otherwise. This seems like a great activity structure for struggling students because it starts off in a nonthreatening way – no numbers, how ’bout that? – and lets them build confidence before they ever have to solve anything.

Do I think that every word problem should be presented this way? No. But I do think this is a great way to prompt rich discussion and get students to notice and grapple with the relationships in problem situations and to observe how the language helps us understand those relationships. To me this is a scaffold that can help get students to attend to information and language. As many teachers like to say, standardized tests are as much reading tests as they are math tests.

Perhaps you can use this activity structure when students are seeing a new problem type for the first time and then fade away from using it over time. Or maybe you have students who have been doing great understanding word problems, but lately they’re rushing through them and making careless errors. This might be an opportunity to use this structure to slow them down and get them thinking again.

I have been talking up Talking Points ever since I got home from Twitter Math Camp in July. Don’t know what Talking Points are? No problem. You can learn more about them on the Twitter Math Camp wiki. We had a group led by @cheesemonkeysf who dove deeply into this topic and shared their work with the rest of us. When you have a chance, I suggest reading the document titled About Talking Points. In the meantime, here’s a brief summary:

Talking Points are simply a list of thoughts. They are statements which can be factually accurate, contentious, or downright wrong. They can be thought-provoking, interesting, irritating, amusing, smart, simple, brief or wordy.

That definition aside, it’s not so important to know what Talking Points are as it is to know what to do with them and why.

Often children (and even adults) are asked to discuss their ideas or work together in groups, but it quickly becomes apparent that those involved don’t really know what is being asked of them.

You have those participants who love to talk, but they don’t really know how to consider other people’s views. On the other hand, you have participants who are quiet. They find it hard to join in the conversation.

The role of the teacher is to make explicit the kind of talk that is useful, and that is where the Talking Points activity comes in.

The activity stimulates speaking, listening, thinking, and learning. It offers ways in to thinking more deeply about the subject under discussion. It gives everyone a chance to say what is on their mind, so that others can decide whether they agree or disagree.

If you want to try out the activity, you need to create small groups of about 4 people per group. Give each group a list of Talking Points. (You can write your own, or you can start by using some of the ones on the Twitter Math Camp wiki.) The group will engage in 3 rounds per Talking Point.

Round 1

One person reads a Talking Point

Go around the group. Each person says whether they AGREE, DISAGREE, or are UNSURE about the statement AND WHY.

The most important part of this is that there is NO COMMENT by anyone else in the group. Their job is to listen.

After everyone has had their turn, proceed to round 2.

Round 2

Go around the group again. Each person says whether they AGREE, DISAGREE, or are UNSURE about their own original statement OR about someone else’s statement they just heard AND SAY WHY.

Again, there should be NO COMMENT from anyone else in the group while someone is speaking.

After everyone has had their turn, proceed to round 3.

Round 3

Go around the group one final time. Each person simply states whether they AGREE, DISAGREE, or are UNSURE about the original statement. The group takes a tally and moves on to the next Talking Point.

When time is up, the facilitator can choose whether to have the participants complete a group self-assessment. (Check out the wiki for an example.) This gives them a chance to reflect on the discussion and how their group worked together.

The facilitator can also do a whole group debrief. I highly recommend doing this because it helps the participants reflect together, and it also gives the facilitator a chance to point out and emphasize to everyone behaviors and ways of talking that were effective. Here are sample questions that could be discussed:

Who in your group asked a helpful questions and what was it?

Who in your group changed their mind about a Talking Point? How did that occur?

Who in your group encouraged someone else? How did that benefit the conversation?

Who in your group provided an interesting additional idea and what was it?

What did your group disagree about and why?

You might be thinking to yourself, “Oh this activity is just like ___.” I’ve had several people tell me that, but once they have participated in their first Talking Points activity, they see how much deeper the conversation is than in the other activities they were thinking of.

The first time I tried this activity was with our district interventionists. This school year we are leading PD sessions with them about 10 times spread across the year, and one of the recurring themes is knowing their learners in general and using strategies to foster a growth mindset in particular. Before we dove into this topic, we created some Talking Points to get them talking with one another about their beliefs about intelligence and learning. Here is the set we used:

Talking Points About Intelligence and Personal Qualities

Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t change very much.

You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are.

No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.

You can substantially change how intelligent you are.

You are a certain kind of person, and there is not much that can be done to really change it.

No matter what kind of person you are, you can always change it substantially.

You can do things differently, but the important parts of who you are can’t really be changed.

You can always change basic things about the kind of person you are.

The Talking Points were successful in getting the interventionists to start talking about ideas of growth mindset without us have to tell them anything. Many of them already felt strongly that intelligence can change (which made me happy considering the population they serve!) but I appreciated the discussion in a few of the groups where one person was able to point out some nuance in the language that made the others in the group consider the statement more carefully.

For example, in one group someone raised the point that she has an uncle with Down syndrome, and over the course of his life she doesn’t feel that his intelligence has really changed all that much. This personal experience made it difficult for her to fully agree with the Talking Points statements.

When the groups were finished discussing their Talking Points, we debriefed as a whole group. One of the recurring comments they made was how nice it was to have a chance to give their opinion and feel like it was heard by the rest of the group. Because of the “No Comment” rule, they knew that no one was going to interrupt them, and if someone tried, the other group members quickly reminded them of the rule.

A few weeks later, I was asked to share Talking Points with our district leaders at a Vertical Leadership Team meeting. This meeting consisted of all of the principals from all of our elementary, middle, and high schools as well as many other district leaders, about 120 folks in total. No pressure! I was nervous about what they’d think, but happy to have the forum to share the activity.

As with the interventionists, I was using the activity to lead in to a discussion of growth mindset research, but this time I revised the statements because I wanted them to each feel unique. In the first set I used, I felt like several statements said the same thing but in different ways. Here are the statements I finally settled on:

Talking Points About Learning and Intelligence

You can learn new things but you can’t really change how intelligent you are.

You are a certain kind of person, and there is not much that can be done to really change it.

When you are learning something new, you should avoid making mistakes at all costs.

You are smart when you can complete tasks quickly and accurately.

The people who are the best in their field tend to be naturally good at what they do.

I only had 20 minutes to introduce Talking Points, share how to do them, have everyone in the room try them, and then debrief. It was a rush to get it all done, but it went smoothly enough. I definitely think 30-35 minutes is probably better for a first introduction.

I love walking around and listening in on different discussions while the groups are going through the Talking Points. While listening to the district leaders, I loved hearing one woman say, “Well, I did agree with the statement, but now I disagree because of what you two just told me. I just didn’t know that before.” It’s not required that anyone change anyone else’s mind during Talking Points, but it sure is powerful that it has that ability to happen based on just three short rounds of sharing opinions.

Someone in my department used Talking Points just over a week ago with a team of instructional coaches. While each grade level has some common ELA vocabulary that is used, the way it is used has not always been consistent across grades. Before the coaches started preparing for upcoming PD sessions, she had them go through some Talking Points about the vocabulary. She said it was such a quick and powerful way to gain clarity as a group before they started their planning.

Ever since I’ve shared Talking Points, it has started to slowly spread in my district, and I’m excited to see the creative ways it is used to deepen conversations among both students and staff.

Tonight we kicked off a new weekly Twitter chat, #ElemMathChat. Hooray! As the name implies, the chat is designed for elementary school folks to talk about math.

I’ve been so excited to get this chat started! For the past two years, I’ve been a member of the MathTwitterBlogoSphere whose membership is primarily composed of middle and high school teachers. There are a few of us elementary-minded folks. We have appreciated all of the interactions we’ve had with the MTBoS. However, after meeting up at this year’s Twitter Math Camp, we decided our mission this year is to grow the elementary-side of the MTBoS.

And so it begins.

Tonight’s chat was a huge success! We had a great turnout with educators from around the US and Canada. (Thanks for catching my mistake @ChrisHunter36!) Everyone seemed excited about having a forum to discuss elementary math specifically. One person even commented that she was happy to have a place where she could be taken seriously. She said she’s tired of being considered “cute” for teaching first grade.

Our topic for the first chat was balancing problem solving with teaching/covering math skills. If you want to catch up on the conversation, you can check out the Storify put together by @davidwees. While the overall conversation was energetic and interesting, I was left a tiny bit disappointed.

I think it’s because I was the one who suggested this topic. Balancing problem solving and covering math skills is something I have struggled with myself as a teacher, and now as a district curriculum specialist, I am hearing from numerous teachers who are struggling to find the same balance themselves. So going in, I had some clear ideas of what I wanted to talk about and get out of the discussion.

The first question was “How do you define problem solving in the elementary math class?” This generated some interesting discussion. Some key points that rose to the surface for me were that problem solving involves thinking critically, collaborating, and using math as a tool. I especially like the “math as a tool” metaphor because it gives meaning to why we’re learning it in the first place. I think it’s often an implied message, but one educators need to try to make more explicit. I also liked how people described problem solving as a time to make kids get out of their comfort zones and make their brains sweat. I love the image that conjures in my mind.

The interesting thing that came out of this first question is that everyone seems to have different ideas about what problem solving is. Some people talked about it in a way that sounded like solving word problems, whereas others referred to rich and engaging tasks that focus more on the process than the endpoint. This is one area where Twitter chats can frustrate me. The conversation is happening so fast with so many people talking simultaneously that it can be challenging to pull the threads together into a coherent whole.

Maybe that’s what I need to learn how to do as a moderator. Instead of following my script of questions, I could have stopped and made question 2 be “So I’ve heard problem solving described as ___, ___, ___, and ___. What is one definition we can all agree on?” The conversation over the rest of the hour felt weaker because we didn’t necessarily have an agreed-upon definition to base our discussion on.

Question 2 also had some problems: “How do you define math skills?” This is where I had a clear idea of what I meant, but the majority of the group was on a different wavelength. Since we had just talked about problem solving, everyone seemed to think that I meant the Standards for Mathematical Practice or general thinking skills that are needed to solve problems. What I really meant, and I did try to clarify, are the nuts and bolts skills that teachers need to teach their kids: adding and subtracting whole numbers within 1,000, multiplying fractions with whole numbers, interpreting dot plots, and measuring angles, to name a few.

Here’s an example to illustrate the tension I was thinking about when suggesting this week’s topic. Learning a skill like long division takes time and effort. It is a very structured thing to do, but until students understand it, they are prone to making many errors. Can I do a few problem solving activities and have my kids somehow come away from the experiences as masters of long division?

You may be thinking right now, “But kids don’t actually have to know long division in order to solve problems. They just need a strategy that makes sense to them.”

I agree with you. However, in Texas and in Common Core, the standards do explicitly state that students learn to divide using the standard algorithm. So like it or not, it’s a skill that students are expected to learn.

Here’s where the tension comes in. Long division is just one skill. There are numerous other skills students are also expected to master in any given grade. How do you ensure the nuts and bolts mastery while at the same time providing ample opportunity for the types of activities that require critical thinking, collaboration, and brain sweating?

And please don’t take any of this the wrong way; I don’t fault anyone in the chat for not providing me a satisfying answer. To be honest, I don’t think a one hour Twitter chat is going to be the place to find concrete answers to big questions like this. It doesn’t mean I don’t want answers (hence the tiny bit of disappointment I felt), but I have learned over the past two years what Twitter can and can’t do.

What it can do is bring together like-minded people to fuel conversations and build relationships. The more I connect with people on Twitter, the more I get to know them. I can start chatting with them outside of our weekly chats. Perhaps I ask for help with a problem I’m having, or perhaps we set up a Google Hangout to have an actual conversation about a particular issue (good-bye 140 character limit!), or maybe we even collaborate on a proposal for a national conference.

Valuable professional relationships can grow from short, weekly conversations. It’s why I’m still here two years later, and it’s why I’m excited to get this specific chat launched. I’m eager to meet like-minded elementary folks and start forging some new professional relationships.

One thing I’ve learned in my first month and a half at my new job is to be prepared for anything. A few weeks ago, my boss told me and the elementary ELA lead that we were going to be providing professional development to our district’s 107(!) interventionists. Not only that, but we would be providing them a total of 14(!) all-day PD sessions over the course of the school year.

On one hand, how cool is it that we get to work with every single one of our campus interventionists to create some shared vision around Response to Intervention and to help build their knowledge and skills of math and reading intervention?

On the other hand, holey moley! That is quite an undertaking on top of our other job responsibilities.

Just over a week ago, we held our first session. Thankfully over the course of planning for it (and getting feedback from interventionists who couldn’t believe they were going to be off campus 14 full days during the year) this adventure did come into better focus. For example, instead of having to plan 4 hour sessions each time, my partner and I only have to prepare 2-2.5 hour sessions on math intervention. In addition, instead of meeting 14 times during the school year, the higher ups knocked that number down to 9.

It’s still a big undertaking, no doubt about it, but it is feeling more and more manageable. On top of that, our first session went beautifully. Our primary goal, which I’m happy to report we achieved, was getting buy-in from the interventionists, many of whom had no idea this was even going to happen until a few days before the first meeting. Now that the first session is over, I’m excited for the work ahead.

Since this is such a big project, I’m going to try to blog and reflect about it this year to see what I learn from it to apply to future endeavors. I also want to share my experiences in case anyone else out there can benefit from them.

The day started with all of the interventionists in a large group to hear from the higher ups about the purposes of these meetings and why they felt they are important enough to warrant so much time away from school. The district leads for RtI and dyslexia also went over some important changes that the interventionists needed to know about. When all of that was over, the interventionists broke up into groups to attend either a math session or ELA session.

Show time!

I opened the math session with everyone sitting in a community circle. My background is in a program called Tribes, and while I mostly used it with my students, the community building ideas apply to adults as well. The first thing I did was have everyone go around and introduce themselves, describe the types of intervention they provide on their campus, and then tell everyone a movie, book, or TV character that best represented how they felt at that moment.

I told them I felt like Lucy from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, specifically the scene where she parts the coats in the wardrobe to reveal a newly discovered snowy landscape before her. I told them I felt like I knew what I was getting into with this job, but being asked to do these sessions this year opened me up to exciting new possibilities I hadn’t imagined. I added that I hoped nobody would be turned to stone or sacrificed on a stone table during the year.

As the interventionists went around the circle, I was impressed with how thoughtful, creative, and telling their responses were. Listening to them talk, I picked up on themes about wanting to be in control but feeling overwhelmed, about wanting to do the best job possible for their students, and about recognizing this opportunity to grow as a leader on their campus. While at first I had felt silly asking them to name a movie, book, or TV character, it ended up being a great way for them to share their feelings and realize that many people in the room felt the same way.

After introductions we moved into an activity called Talking Points. I learned about this activity in July from @cheesemonkeysf at Twitter Math Camp. I love Talking Points! They provide a way for people to improve exploratory talk, to dive deeper and have more meaningful conversation. You can download instructions and see examples of Talking Points on the Twitter Math Camp wiki.

The Talking Points that I had the interventionists do were all statements related to growth and fixed mindset. The statements didn’t use those exact words, but rather they got the groups talking about things like whether intelligence is something that can or cannot be changed. I did this on purpose because I wanted to know their current thinking on the matter. As interventionists, these people work with students who are having a difficult time in school. They not only need academic support, but they need someone who can help motivate them and encourage them to believe that they can learn. Like I told the interventionists, “If you didn’t believe that these kids can learn, then why would you bother showing up to work every day?”

Thankfully the interventionists seemed to believe in growth mindset by and large, so the groups tended to agree with each other, which I’m ultimately okay with. I was happy to see some dissenting opinions here and there though. Those groups were able to tease out some interesting ideas that the other groups missed out on.

After debriefing the Talking Points, I gave the interventionists a copy of our district’s math goals. I asked them to read the goals and do a quick write about how these goals are currently being met (or not) in their campus’ intervention program. Then they talked about their notes with the other folks at their table. This discussion was interesting because some of the interventionists didn’t even know we had district math goals. It also got some of them questioning whether their current intervention program was meeting the goals.

I used this discussion to segue into the foundation for our work this year, the What Works Clearinghouse guide on RtI: Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics: Response to Intervention (RtI) for Elementary and Middle Schools. The guide was put together by a panel including a research mathematician who is active in K-8, two professors of math education, several special educators, and a math coach. It provides 8 specific recommendations to help schools implement math intervention. The recommendations are based on the best available research evidence and the panel’s expertise in mathematics, special education, research, and practice.

Here are the 8 recommendations:

Screen all students to identify those at risk for potential mathematics difficulties and provide interventions to students identified as at risk.

Instructional materials for students receiving interventions should focus intensely on in-depth treatment of whole numbers in kindergarten through grade 5 and on rational numbers in grades 4 through 8. These materials should be selected by committee.

Instruction during intervention should be explicit and systematic. This includes providing models of proficient problem solving, verbalization of thought processes, guided practice, corrective feedback, and frequent cumulative review.

Interventions should include instruction on solving word problems that is based on common underlying structures.

Intervention materials should include opportunities for students to work with visual representations of mathematical ideas and interventionists should be proficient in the use of visual representations of mathematical ideas.

Interventionists at all grade levels should devote about 10 minutes in each session to building fluent retrieval of basic arithmetic facts.

Monitor the progress of students receiving supplemental instruction and other students who are at risk.

Include motivational strategies in tier 2 and tier 3 interventions.

All of the work we do this year is going to revolve around these 8 recommendations. To help kick it off, I had the interventionists look more closely at recommendations 2, 3, 4, and 5. I copied the sections about each of those four recommendations from the guide, and I had each interventionist read one of the sections. When they were done, they got together with the other people who read about the same recommendation. They collaborated to create two slides. The first slide contained up to 4 key points about their recommendation. The other slide contained noticings and wonderings their group had based on what they read. When the session was over, I put all of the slides together into one presentation that the interventionists could keep as a reference or that they could share with others on their campuses.

The interventionists were very receptive to what they read in the 4 recommendations we focused on in this session. They liked that the emphasis is supposed to be on number concepts rather than trying to keep up with what the teacher is doing in the classroom. Some of them said that by trying to fill gaps instead of focusing on key concepts they often feel like content mastery teachers rather than interventionists. They are hoping they can better define their role through our work this year.

We ended the session by revisiting our district math goals to see how they related to the 8 recommendations. It was very easy for the interventionists to see that these recommendations align very well with our district’s math goals. That’s not to say that their work with their students in meeting these goals will be any easier per se, but it is reassuring to know that the work they are doing with their students is going to be meaningful and supported by research.

All in all, the interventionists left excited about the adventure we’re embarking upon. They’re especially happy that they’ll have the opportunity to get to know each other better so they can utilize each other as resources. I couldn’t ask for a better outcome from our first time together. Part of me is even a little sad that I only get to plan 8 more sessions instead of 13.